Through the Past Darkly: Reflections on UFC on FX 7

What happens is he wins a few fights, gets a bit of momentum going, and starts buzzing in the UFC’s ear about a title shot. So the UFC tells him fine, win one more, this time against an opponent who is or has recently been in that same conversation, and it’s yours. That’s when Bisping loses.

The good news is, he manages to confine his defeats almost exclusively to that scenario. Three of his past four losses have come in fights in which, had he won, his prize would have been a crack at the champion. The bad news is, he’s yet to win one of those. And how long can you keep pushing that rock up the hill, only to get flattened as it rolls back on you just before you reach the top?

There are two dangers for a fighter who gets caught in this particular spin cycle. The first is that he’ll get his hopes dashed one time too many and decide to redefine his career goals. You’ll know a fighter has hit this point when he stops seeking title shots and starts chasing “exciting fights.” He sparks rivalries with opponents who won’t move him any closer to the top. He brawls and bleeds and rants and raves in the hopes that, if he can’t be remembered as a champion, he’ll at least be remembered as a fan favorite. Call it a hunch, but I don’t see Bisping going in this direction.

The second danger is that Bipsing (23-5 MMA, 13-5 UFC) won’t do any of that stuff, but fans will wish he had. They’ll get tired of hearing him talk about the title shot he has consistently failed to earn. They’ll get sick of watching him do that tortured rankings math in his head, and whatever interest they might have had in seeing him fight for a title will evaporate as he struggles just to prove he can get there. Because if you can’t beat the contenders, what chance do you have against the champion? If Vitor Belfort (22-10 MMA, 11-6 UFC) can find your skull with his shin, as he did at Saturday’s UFC on FX 7 event in Sao Paulo, who’s to say you could even hold Anderson Silva’s interest long enough to convince him to visit some spectacular manner of violence upon you?

I think that’s the greater risk for Bisping, who now finds himself at a career crossroads. He’s slipping into his mid-30s, and the dream of simply earning a title shot – forget actually laying hands on the belt itself – is starting to seem less and less realistic. At the same time, what else would we have him do? He’s still better than 90 percent of the middleweights out there. He just seems to be stuck in the lower end of the top 10, with no clear path forward.

Also, at this point we can’t ignore the role testosterone-replacement therapy has played in Bisping’s career, despite the fact that, to our knowledge, he’s never actually used it himself. In fact, he’s been one of the most vocal opponents of TRT. That must make it even more frustrating that his title-shot hopes keep getting derailed by guys who are known or at least strongly suspected of being testosterone “patients.” It’s even worse when you get knocked out by those fighters because every concussion comes with a price. How much of a role did TRT play in those losses? It’s impossible to say. After all, TRT didn’t make Bisping circle straight into Dan Henderson’s right hand. Then again, you think fighters would be so adamant about injecting testosterone if it didn’t work?

At least Belfort has goals…

In my Sunday column I covered Belfort’s bizarre and yet not totally unreasonable (at least in the current UFC climate) request for a rematch with Jon Jones. It won’t happen – not if the UFC brass has any sense at all – but at least the force of the demand, along with the force of that head kick, has got us talking about “The Phenom” again.

But, now that we’re talking, what are we saying? The Belfort-related chatter I see centers around two points: 1) Why call out the champion who beat you outside your division, rather than the champ who beat you inside of it? and 2) Are you on that TRT or not, Young Dinosaur?

The first point is straightforward enough. My guess is Belfort thinks he’s closer to beating Jones, whom he nearly armbarred, than he is to beating Anderson Silva, who almost instantly turned him into highlight fodder. Fair enough, even if I doubt you’re going to surprise Jones with the same armbar twice. But the second point, that one is sticky. Belfort hasn’t said that he’s on TRT, but he also hasn’t said he’s not, even when asked directly.

That’s the worst thing a fighter can do. It makes him seem guilty and ashamed, like he knows he’s getting away with something and doesn’t want to draw attention to it. That, in turn, makes us want to talk about it. If he’d either denied it altogether or copped to using TRT and offered some passionate, though medically absurd, defense of the practice, the way Chael Sonnen has (no, Chael, you won’t die without regular injections of synthetic testosterone), the wind would’ve gone out of the sails by now. It’s when you duck the question that you look like a man with something to hide. Fans start to put little mental asterisks next to every fight you win from then on, and you quickly find yourself without the moral high ground from which to call any other fighter a “clown.”

C.B. Dollaway squeaks out another one as Daniel Sarafian fades

If you only saw the first round of C.B. Dollaway’s bout with Daniel Sarafian (7-3 MMA, 0-1 UFC), you could be forgiven for assuming that Dollaway (13-4 MMA, 7-4 UFC) was headed for a quick nap. The Brazilian thumped him at will in the early going, and Dollaway went back to his corner at the end of the first round looking like he was fresh out of ideas. But as Sarafian slowed down, Dollaway came on. He nearly finished the fight at the end of the second and then had just enough gas in the tank to outwork Sarafian in the third.

It was far from a dominant or even an obvious victory – those rarely result in a post-fight interview that you have to do with your hands on your knees – but after a start like that, I’m sure Dollaway will take it. As for Sarafian, he proved he’s one “TUF: Brazil” alum worth keeping an eye on. If he learns how to finish the same way he starts, look out.

Gabriel Gonzaga enters the second (or is it the third?) act of his career

Oh, the ups and downs of this Brazilian heavyweight. From the time he Cro Cop’d Mirko Filipovic all the way to his submission victory over Ben Rothwell this past Saturday, it seems like Gabriel Gonzaga’s lived several lifetimes. He was a UFC heavyweight title contender, then he was a guy who heavyweight up-and-comers beat up on their rise through the ranks, and then, briefly, he was gone. He’s 2-0 in his current UFC run, with both fights taking place in Brazil, and if you didn’t know better, you might think things were starting to click for one of the few UFC fighters brave enough to sport his true tangle of chest hair of live TV.

But what do you do with a guy like Gonzaga (14-6 MMA, 9-5 UFC), who’s already posted losses to Junior dos Santos, Fabricio Werdum and Brendan Schaub, among others? He almost feels like a ghost of the UFC’s heavyweight past, haunting the edges of the division and reminding us of the era when Randy Couture came out of retirement specifically because he thought the division was a weak, sick animal waiting to be picked off by an opportunistic predator. That’s not to say Gonzaga’s got no future here now. Wins are wins, and Ben Rothwell (32-9 MMA, 2-3 UFC) is not known for being an easy tap. Still, Gonzaga picked a tough time to try to make a fresh run in the UFC’s heavyweight class. It’s not 2008 anymore. There are no more Justin McCullys in this division.

After an ultra-violent win, “Nurmy” wants Nate Diaz

While watching Khabib Nurmagomedov (19-0 MMA, 3-0 UFC) elbow Thiago Tavares (17-5-1 MMA, 7-5-1 UFC) in and out of consciousness, my thoughts started to drift. That’ll happen when the referee – in this case, Dan Miragliotta – is apparently conducting his own study to see how much trauma the human brain can take before it melts down and begins leaking out the ears. But somewhere along the 12th or 13th consecutive blow landed by “The Eagle,” I began to wonder why we haven’t seen this guy take a bigger jump up in competition yet. Nothing against Thiago Tavares, who brought a two-fight winning streak into this execution of a bout, but Nurmagomedov is now 19-0 with three straight wins in the UFC. Isn’t it time he moved beyond the win-a-few, lose-a-few set in the lightweight division?

Apparently, he thinks so. He mentioned in his post-fight interview (while sporting his trademark wig, of course) that he’d like to face Nate Diaz next. Now there’s a fight that sounds like a lot of fun, especially considering Nurmagomedov’s little jab at jiu-jitsu with his weigh-in T-shirt. Something tells me Diaz won’t have much of a sense of humor about that, just like he won’t even bother trying to learn how to pronounce Nurmagomedov’s last name before promising to give him a Stockton-style beating. I can think of no better way to find out where the ceiling might be for this talented Russian.

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